Opinion | National security law: Hong Kong’s young crusaders should stand down to fight another day
- Political judgment takes time to mature. Up against the sledgehammer of a mandated national security law, the city’s pro-democracy protesters should avoid confrontation with Beijing to win themselves the time and space to grow up
I wouldn’t mind being 20-something again. That was about the only time in my life that I considered myself blunder-immune, and – as best as I can recall – the only time I felt sure I knew just about everything I’d ever need to know. Oh, were they the good old days!
Sometimes at 20-something, you do get things right. Consider the US invasion of Vietnam, for example. The truth was, president Lyndon Johnson made a terrible mistake.
At 20 or so, I wrote the first scorching anti-war editorial in my college newspaper. My political science professor, making fun of my bid for immortality, termed the editorial immature and naive. But on that one (and only that one) the kid was right, and the professor was wrong.
The risk with permitting “young adults” to decide important turns in our political and economic lives is that they may be right on some things, but they can’t be right on everything – and maybe not even on most.
If they were, we could throw out the need for much of their costly higher education and ignore the findings of scientists who say that the brain does not reach processing maturity as quickly as young people think. So what are the odds they will get the big ones right?
Examples? Surely, we can all agree that the Chinese kids who power-punched the Cultural Revolution to paroxysms of insanity were not exactly mature decision-makers. And, surely, every candid reader provide an example, from their own household life, of judgments by the younger set they would wish never to become general public policy.